Notice: Folks, that part is NOT a commercial for HP
production of any means! In fact, a series of HP computers I have been using
has delivered failures in power supply units, problems with hard disks etc.
On the other side, laptop's batteries get exhausted earlier than expected.
Other than these issues, HP machines are fine.

HP Omnibook 6000

A laptop computer Omnibook 6000 is equipped with a 'bootable' DVD
drive and recently, at an ICT conference, I bought a bootable DVD-ROM
with Mandrake Linux 9.1 installation. After booting the laptop with
that bootable DVD, it gets directly to the Linux installation menu.

HP Vectra VL420 (used as a server)

In opposite, an HP Vectra VL420 doesn't have a DVD drive (it only
has a CD drive), so the direct installation from that particular
installation DVD is not possible. But, an option of making
a bootable floppy disk for starting the installation procedure
is possible. In fact, several boot images are available
for those users who don't have (bootable or not) DVD drive. One
of the images is a 'network' one. That means, in a local area network
there has to be either a NFS, FTP or HTTP server from which the
installation will take place.

HP Vectra VL420 (used as a workstation)

Another VL420 desktop system I also use, has a spare HDD from a
previous Windows 2000 server installation (actually, that IDE disk was moved
from the other computer where it was a primary one and here it is the second
one disk for backup data). The nice things is that it has a HTTP and FTP
servers installed (of course, usable if the system is boot from that disk).
That was good so I could use one of these servers now.

So, I made a 'network' bootable floppy and booted the first Vectra
VL420 (intended to be a Linux server) with it. After a while, it
came to a point to choose the installation method (NFS or FTP or
HTTP server). At first, I wanted to use the second 'spare' HTTP
server at the other Vectra mentioned above, but regardless of what
permission I tried to give to the 'Everyone' group of Windows users,
I always got the following answer from the Linux setup:

Error: Couldn't get file ... (or something like that)

Then I tried to use the FTP 'spare' server from the second Vectra and at
first it also asked for local and remote IP addresses. That time successfully,
it started to load a part of the remote Linux files into its memory without
any complaint. Soon after, it came to the very same position as Omnibook
6000 did: it got directly to the installation menu, asking a user to choose
a language for the installation use.

>From that point, the setup process was almost the same...

I have chosen/confirmed the following items:

- a language to use, besides English(American) as default: I added
Unicode and Serbian (both Cyrillic and Latin);
- a mouse and keyboard;
- a security level - I accepted defaults: 'Standard' for laptop and 'Higher'
for server;

The next important task was to choose one of DrakX
partitioning options:

- for laptop I chose the 'Use the free space on the Windows
partition', because the laptop has one IDE hard disk and I wanted
it to use a part of it for Linux (besides existing Windows 2000 Prof.
already installed). Windows' Disk Management reported:

The two partitions (FAT & FAT32) were made during the installation
procedure using HP's supplied installation CD's.

At the first moment, Linux setup complained that my Windows partition
"was too fragmented" and required me to reboot under Windows, run
the "defrag" utility, then restart the Mandrake Linux installation.
The defragmentation process have taken cca. 1.5 hour to be completed!
When restarted the setup, it wanted to use 7.13 GB Windows partition,
instead of 20.80 GB. I chose to 'Use the free space'. Then it made partitions
for Linux: /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda7.

- for Vectra VL420 I used 'Custom disk partitioning' because there
I had two SCSI disks, one of them running Windows 2000 Server
already installed, and the other one I wanted to use entirely for a
Linux server. BTW, I wasn't sure what the option 'Erase entire disk'
would do during its next step (erase a whole disk or a partition?),
although it also may be the proper solution too. DrakX
recognized the two SCSI disks as sda and sdb
and I chose sdb to install Linux. The first step was to 'Clear
all' and after that to 'Auto allocate' the space on that second disk.
Finally, after a 'Done' it appeared to make /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb6
Linux partitions.

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default="windows"
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="quiet devfs=mount acpi=off"
vga=788 <--- that line is missing at laptop with LCD screen above.
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe devfs=nomount acpi=off"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1 <--- /dev/hda1 seems not to be reserved for HP diags here.
label="windows" There I have Windows 2000 Professional already
table=/dev/hda installed (probably without HP's supplied CD's).
other=/dev/hdb1 <--- that is the spare disk with Windows 2000 Server.
label="windows2" Actually I had some data on it and used it as a
table=/dev/hdb second, backup disk on that desktop workstation.
map-drive=0x80 I have never tried to boot the computer from it, but
to=0x81 Mandrake's setup offered it as a boot option.
map-drive=0x81 (And that was useful as a FTP server, needed to install
to=0x80 Mandrake Linux on the other box - without DVD drive too).
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe

HP Vectra VL420 (installed as a desktop Linux system with server features)

>From the examples above, you could see that I have been using
various computer forms with also various types of hard disk.
Somewhere there is only one IDE drive, somewhere else there are
two of them, otherwise there are a couple of SCSI drives etc. Regardless
of that, I always tried to put LILO into the MBR - located on the first
disk. Now it looks like that Linux finally managed to solve the old
1024 cyl problem. In fact, LILO seems to be capable to boot
Linux regardless it is placed close to the rest of Linux partitions or not.

There are some other considerations related to the experiment above,
but they are part of the other fine document:
Linux+WindowsNT mini-HOWTO.